Again, Why George W.
Bush Must
be Tried as a War Criminal by Bob Fitrakiswww.dissidentvoice.org
April 22, 2004First Published in
The Free Press

The
new revelations in Bob Woodward’s book,
Plan of Attack, provide further evidence to convict President George W.
Bush of war crimes.

As one of the 49 original
signers of the UN Charter, the United States committed itself to the ideals
and practices of the norms of international law. Only two U.S. senators
voted against the treaty, which includes Article 2(4) that specifically
prohibits “…the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or
political independent of any state….” In a September 23, 2003 speech to the
United Nations, President Bush noted that both the UN Charter and American
founding documents “recognize a moral law that stands above men and nations,
which must be defended and enforced by men and nations.” Following World War
II, just such action was taken at the Nuremberg trials and American,
British, French and Soviet jurists established Article VI of the Nuremberg
Charter, which legally defines “Crimes Against Peace.”

To commit a crime against
peace, one must engage in “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of
war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties . . . or
participation in a common plan or conspiracy . . . to wage an aggressive
war.” Bush is guilty on all these counts. The most damning evidence coming
not from the liberal left, but in a series of well-documented books
providing revelations by people in his own administration or party. Now,
with Woodward’s work, the President is condemned with his own words.

Author Ron Susskind’s book
about former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill,
The Price of Loyalty, reveals that from the very beginning of the Bush
administration, the President was plotting and conspiring to wage aggressive
war against Iraq. In
Against All Enemies, Bush’s counter-terrorism expert,
Richard Clarke, not only confirmed O’Neill’s account of the Bush
administration’s obsession with attacking Iraq, yet also shows us an
insider’s view on the illegal planning, preparation and initiation of the
war through the deliberate manipulation of intelligence. President Nixon’s
strategist, Kevin Phillips, documents four generations of war profiteering
and deception by the Bush/Walker clan in
American Dynasty.

Finally, in the latest
blockbuster, Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate reporter Bob Woodward outlines
Bush’s illegal attack plan. Woodward establishes that five days after 9/11,
the President was secretly scheming to go after, not bin Laden –- the man
responsible for the 9/11 attack –- but rather bin Laden’s arch enemy Saddam
Hussein. Specifically, 72 days after 9/11, Bush gave Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld the orders to draw up the secret war plans. Once enacted,
these plans made George W. Bush a war criminal, just like the Nazi generals
at Nuremberg.

Bush, supported by the
mainstream corporate media, has hidden behind the semantics of
“pre-emption.” Under international law, a pre-emptive strike is allowed when
a nation is preparing for an imminent attack. Bush would be hard pressed
before any tribunal, short of a Texas kangaroo court, to establish that the
Iraqi military was an imminent threat to the U.S. Iraq was a defeated,
heavily impoverished nation, under economic sanctions and restricted by
U.S.-enforced no-fly zones in both its north and south.

The so-called “Bush
doctrine” is in reality an echo of the illegal Nazi doctrine of “preventive”
war, which asserted that any country that may pose a future non-specific
threat can be attacked and occupied. This is not “higher moral law,” rather
it is a repugnant Nazi doctrine last heard when Germany attacked Poland
prior to World War II.

Add to the mounting
evidence against Bush’s criminality the fact that his key advisors are the
likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who have been publicly waging a
campaign to attack Iraq since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. A quick
visit to the Project for a New American Century website (www.newamericancentury.org)
establishes their blatant disregard for both the UN Charter and Nuremberg
principles. Their neocon or vulcan ideology draws in part from renegade
Trotskyist Max Shachtman’s belief that authoritarian regimes are incapable
of reform. Thus, they adopt the rhetoric of human rights hawks – painting
any conflict as a clash between “freedom and tyranny” – to resurrect
discredited Nazi war doctrines. Even the ever-cautious Columbus Dispatch
recently editorialized that Bush is a “militant unilateralist” and
attributes the President’s rhetoric and worldview to the “Vulcans.”

Woodward’s book reads, as
do Clarke’s and Susskind’s, as another lengthy prosecutory indictment
against the Bush administration. Bush’s only defense against such blatant
illegality is to find the real or imagined, or more likely recently planted,
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. For the last two months the Mehr News
Agency from Tehran, Iran has reported allegations that the
U.S. and British
governments have been unloading weapons of mass destruction into southern
Iraq. The news service claims that these weapons are dismantled Soviet-era
nuclear material and weapons. Reuters reported these allegations as well.
The President’s recent comments that he hasn’t given up on finding weapons
of mass destruction, sound eerily familiar to his refrain in Florida on
Election Eve, when he was asked if he was going to concede the election when
exit polls showed him losing. He told the media that his brother Jeb’s
political forces on the ground were indicating different results. What are
Bush's forces on the ground in Iraq doing now, particularly his private
contractor friends?

For a President who took us
into war under an illegal Nazi doctrine and sold it to the American people
based on cooked intelligence information, would it not be the next step to
simply plant the evidence he needs amidst the chaos of a disintegrating
Iraq? With the illusion of Iraqi sovereignty fading and potential disaster
looming with a premature turnover, Bush's re-election bid may be based on
his hitting another "trifecta": "capturing" Osama bin Laden, "trying" Saddam
Hussein, and "finding" weapons of mass destruction. The recent alarmist talk
about another terrorist attack prior to the election should be cause for
great concern for an administration that conveniently ignored the
overwhelming evidence of the Al Qaeda attack.

News services worldwide
must stop the madness of George the Lesser, who was as ill-prepared to
accept dynastic succession as the infamous Ethelred the Unready. Historians
of the British monarchy suggest that the term “Unready” should be read as
the archaic British term “redeless” meaning “without counsel.” Thus,
Ethelred, like George the Lesser, made mistakes by impulsively pursuing
action without wise counsel. Thankfully, the wisest of Bush's former
counsels are warning the people this election year. The people of the United
States need to hear their warnings and constitute an international People’s
Tribunal to try President Bush for the war crimes he is committing.

Bob Fitrakis
is a Political Science Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences
department at Columbus State Community College, and author of The Idea of
Democratic Socialism in America and the Decline of the Socialist Party
(Garland Publishers 1993). He is the editor of The Free Press, where this
article first appeared (www.freepress.org).